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Aesthetics of Encounter:
Variations on Translation in Deleuze
MICHAEL LEVAN
University of South Florida
ABSTRACT
Though Gilles Deleuze does not directly address practices of
translation in his philosophical works, several of his concepts touch
on processes of translation. In this essay, I consider several themes
from Deleuze mediation, transformation, and contact that imply a
general philosophical stance toward translation in terms of pure
process. This general stance can be found in a constellation of
concepts best described as an aesthetic of encounter. Since these
themes are far ranging and overlap across several of Deleuzes
works, I approach the aesthetics of encounter in terms of variations,
as an evolving critical-conceptual resonance of melodies in (and on)
translation.
DELEUZE TO TRANSLATION
Deleuze writes sparingly of translation. In the few places he does
address translation by name it is not in terms of translating literature or
speech in the professional sense. Rather, it is discussed in terms of
transformation and movement, which places it very close to some of the
most fundamental themes in his work: becoming, difference, encounter,
motion, creativity. For a process-oriented philosopher like Deleuze,
translation should be an ideal phenomenon. The paucity of its explicit
treatment in his work can perhaps be understood in terms of the implied
centrality of translation processes across his oeuvre. In fact, there are
many ways that translation is an apt metaphor for understanding some
of Deleuzes major themes as well as his style of doing philosophy.
In this essay I extract some concepts from Deleuzes work (both
with Guattari and on his own) that can be seen as principles for a
Deleuzean approach to translation. All of the concepts I present are
variations on themes in Deleuzes philosophy that we can call the
aesthetics of encounter. Some are very clearly applicable to
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Style
Though style is only discussed sporadically in their work, it is one of
the great orienting themes in Deleuze and Guattaris joint projects.
There are styles of space/place (smooth and striated), styles of
lines/politics (supple and rigid), styles of science/invention (nomadic
and royal), styles of literature/rhetoric (minor and major), and styles of
organization/logic (rhizomatic and arboreal). The appearance of simple
dichotomies, however, is misleading. Differences always proceed,
curiously, by conjunction and intermingling the making and
unmaking of assemblages (textual, discursive, disciplinary, national,
etc.). Furthermore, all of these modes of style involve mapping an
assemblage. Because of this, Deleuze and Guattaris concepts always
mutate with each new description and analysis. And, and, and: an
ontological and performative stammering constitutive of their style.
Deleuze and Guattari produce an eccentric phenomenology of events,
transformation, and encounter.
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This sense of movement and becoming expresses a logic of the new and
is irreducible from the notion of an abstract machine discussed above.
Becomings are prior to manifestation, prior to history, and prior to
the organization of bodies and the stratification of places. Becomings
are never about the static connection of points to each other (as in the
transposing of a word from one language into another). Becomings,
rather, pass between points and come up through the middle. A line
or trajectory of becoming has neither beginning nor end, departure nor
arrival, origin nor destination. [. . .] A line of becoming has only a
middle. The middle is not an average; it is a fast motion, it is the
absolute speed of movement (Boundas 1996: 293). This is the sense in
which Deleuze and Guattari understand becomings as intensities,
forces, and affects: speeds and slowness, constellations of affectivity,
haptic spaces, and so on. To translate intensities, or rather to translate
from the point of view of intensive encounters, is what Deleuzes prepersonal process-orientation philosophy offers for translation.
One of the most provocative ways that Deleuze describes becoming
is in terms of capture and theft. In the becoming of translation, it is not
one term which becomes the other, but each encounters the other, a
single becoming which is not common to the two. [. . . ] To encounter is
to find, to capture, to steal, but there is no method for finding other than
a long preparation (Deleuze & Parnet 1987: 7). Continuing, they write,
Stealing is the opposite of plagiarizing, copying, imitating, or doing
like. Capture is always a double-capture, theft a double-theft, and it is
that which creates not something mutual, but an asymmetrical block, an
a-parallel evolution, nuptials, always outside and between (p. 7).
An example of the double capture of the becoming of translation can be
found in Mary Louise Pratts (1992) work on writing and
transculturation in the spaces of ongoing colonial encounters that she
calls contact zones. A double capture or double theft occurs between
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REFERENCES
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